Today's communication networks provide information transport of voice, video and data to both residential and commercial customers with more and more of those customers being connected by fiber optic cables. Current network designs differ among carriers, or service providers, and are influenced by such variables as legacy equipment and architectures, past and present infrastructure investments and network types. These network types include the Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON), the Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) and the Hybrid Fiber-Coaxial (HFC) networks, to name just a few.
A fiber optic cable (or “fiber bundle”) includes a number of individual optical fibers, each of which may be used to transmit significant quantities of information. Some fiber optic network designs include the use of passive components such as optical splitters and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) filters as a way of creating and deploying a more cost effective and efficient access network.
Telecommunications equipment racks often include sliding support shelves, which typically include sliding drawers, for housing and organizing optical hardware and optical fiber cables. These shelves are designed to protect the optical equipment and optical fiber cables, but should also be designed to provide convenient access to the optical components such that installations can be effectuated in a timely manner.
Telecommunication equipment racks and sliding support shelf systems are typically designed with space efficiency in mind. A space efficient design maximizes the density of fiber optic cabling and the corresponding optical components, which can be used to increase the bandwidth of a given network. For example, an equipment rack may be configured with a plurality of shelves mounted in a vertical stack. To maximize the space efficiency of the rack, the vertical spacing between each of the shelves can be minimized, e.g., by designing the rack and shelves to conform to a standardized spacing scheme. A maximum density is achieved by selecting a standardized spacing scheme that leaves little or no space in between the shelves. However, such a spacing scheme makes it difficult to access some of the interior space within the shelves despite the fact that the shelves have a sliding drawer.